Amerika

The problem with the Right, they say, is that we have no new ideas. Well, of course not; we are conservatives, so we like ideas that are as true on the last day as the first.

However, during the centuries of our slumber and the decay of Western Civilization, we have forgotten much of the wisdom of that first day. Consequently people cling to religion, libertarianism, or insanity like National Socialism.

Perhaps we should rewind the tape a little and look at how we got here.

As the COVID-19 panic winds down, a casual reader might be reminded how much of human history consists of manias, trends, fads, and obsessive tunnel vision. Suddenly the orderly narrative we were taught seems thin and tangential.

On this site and the previous two, I have advanced my personal analysis of the situation at hand and a philosophy designed to both address it and prevent its recurrence, called “parallelism” because I have no talent for catchy names.

The radical aspect of this philosophy is that it treats human decisions as logical within the scope of knowledge and computational power of the humans in question, and shows how deference to precedent leads to a steady social collapse.

Called “Crowdism,” this analysis shows us that what we should fear is not a deliberate evil, but an attempt to be “good” that involves a mistaken perception about how the universe works. It is unique in this approach.

In the parallelist worldview, good and evil map to more awareness and less awareness, respectively. Those who learn more about the world and how to operate it naturally tend toward goodness; those who reject it become dependent on illusions and therefore, controlling and manipulative.

Unlike almost all philosophies, this one does not have bad guys who intend to do evil in it, but clueless humans stumbling around trying to find answers, and seizing on what makes convenient sense to their minds instead of what reflects a more complex and messy reality.

Its conclusions, although simple, require complex paths to arrive at the point where they make sense. Its precepts address human knowledge and the patterns of perception, showing where we filter out vital knowledge.

Where most philosophies create an evil and a good, this one creates only a better option and a worse option, based not on intention but on long-term consequences. It is exclusively realist and rejects moralizing without corresponding real-world thinking.

As it tells us, Crowdism is the mental state of any human group, and the tendency of the group to react to previous decisions by the group in order to hold them up, rather than aim toward a positive goal like a higher and more realistic social order:

Whatever engendered this particular mess did not have a leader, or a central organizing principle, although it has manifested itself in centralized authority. A systematic change to this kind of order comes through a shared assumption, much like when a group of friends, upon perceiving their favorite bar is closed, meet at the next most likely place without having to communicate the name amongst themselves. More than a leaderless revolution, it was an unconscious one: those who brought it about had no idea they shared an ideology, or no idea what its name might be, or even why they did it. They simply did it because it was natural to do, and because nothing has since opposed it, it continues to this day in grossly simplified form.

This clashes with our view, brought on not just by Abrahamic religions such as Judeo-Christianity, that there must be forces of good and evil manipulating us from beyond the physical world.

After all, we like having talismans, or absolute symbols of goodness that solve all problems, and scapegoats, or absolute symbols of bad that we can blame for all of our uninformed, illogical, half-thought, selfish, lazy, and stupid mistakes.

However… reality tends to operate with more nuance. Some people are born bad, no doubt, as sociopaths or other parasites, usually through some combination of deleterious mutations and abusive upbringing.

For the most part, however, the risk to us comes in following along with precedent. When we make one bad (unrealistic, illogical, immoral: these are synonyms) decision, we tend to rationalize it as good because it is a sunk cost.

After that, we make more bad decisions because not to do so would be admitting that the first decision was bad, which is a problem …if that decision is highly popular.

Popularity reflects what humans want to believe is true, not what they rationally can expect to be true. When you get a group of humans together, they find it hard to agree on what is real, but easy to agree on the illusions that they like.

This sets a precedent of belief in what is popular over what is real, and at that point, people find it easy to make more decisions rationalized as good according to that first decision.

The root of this is individualism, or the belief that what an individual wants to believe must not be contradicted or prohibited by those who notice that it conflicts with reality. Individualism is crowd rule, the opposite of hierarchy.

Once we start down that path, everything else is predictable:

1. Individualism — “the world is as I want it to be, and anyone who says otherwise is a ‘tyrant'” — gives rise to a general fear of anyone who knows reality better or wields strong power.
2. Equality demands that all people have the right to live in their own little mental bubbles, so that each individual is protected against those who know better, and binds them into a dark organization gang dedicated to abolishing reality and superior mental abilities.
3. Democracy serves as the political arm of egalitarianism, or the belief that all people are equal and/or should be made equal to achieve Progress to Equality Utopia, and abolishes strong smart leaders in favor of actors who pander to the herd.
4. Socialism arises when individuals in democracy find that the conflicts with reality they have ignored are manifesting as poverty, so they want to steal from the haves to give to the have-nots.
5. Feminism follows because when you have said that everyone is equal, it makes no sense to have a little asterisk that says “except women.” Eventually children, felons, and other marginalized groups will be added too.
6. Diversity follows because the haves realize they are getting plundered and, feeling attacked, start voting exclusively for their own interests, at which point government imports foreigners since these always vote against the majority because they fear the majority will exile them, and those who have accepted equality so far find racial and ethnic equality the next logical step.
7. Transsexualism occurs when, since all other groups have been made equal, citizens need a way to show that they are equal but also a step above that because they are enlightened, which you can see as they lift up the downtrodden, so once the women, minorities, midgets, and homosexuals are settled, transsexuals are the next logical step.
8. Militarization happens next because the economy crashes, infrastructure rots, corruption spreads, and people stop working hard or diligently. These changes arise from the spreading thin of income by redistribution, essentially penalizing the good and rewarding the bad, at which point everyone converts to badness in order to survive. Militarization mobilizes society on a wartime footing to keep social order and some functional economy.
9. Panopticon follows when centralization has lost loyalty of the citizens, so starts buying loyalty by rewarding those who turn in others, at which point every citizen might as well be a security camera installed by government itself.
10. Third worlding transpires when the country has been savaged by socialism, diversity, and despair, causing the smart to exit without children and the dumb to breed recklessly, ending up a corrupt, genetically-chaotic, filthy, impoverished, and generally discoordinated wasteland.

Nowhere in here do we see deliberate evil. People choose individualism because they have a lack of faith or connection to their society, probably because as a society succeeds two things happen:

1. It loses a sense of direction by assuming that its previous direction was proven right, therefore all it needs to do now is “manage” itself by reducing risks, fears, and inefficiencies.
2. It confuses means and ends, since now the goal (ends) of having a functional civilization has been replaced by the new goal of repeating the same methods (means) that got them there in the past.

In this way, civilization drifts away from reality, and at this point, fatalism kicks in, or a belief that life is without purpose and therefore any one decision is about as good as any other.

With the growth of population size as well people feel anonymous and look for ways to stand out, almost all of which take the form of saying “we all know what is right because it is real, but consider this oddball quirky unreal thing as if it were real because that way, you are more powerful than reality.”

You can observe the same thing happening in societies after wars. They desire peace, they think, but then realize that no one stands out or rises in peacetime except by scamming each other with clever products.

Fatalism can be seen as a form of acedia, or spiritual laziness arising from a sense of the futility of all actions because no outcome leads to victory in the way we have defined it:

Acedia is a word that defies easy definition while being a phenomenon all too familiar to us. The term refers to spiritual sloth — a state whose symptoms include moroseness, weariness, fatigue, melancholy, gloominess, feeling overworked, discouragement, dejection, instability, activism, boredom, disenchantment, depression, languor, torpor, mediocrity, laziness, loss of interest, lack of fervor, compromise, a repulsion to the things of God, a deprivation of the meaning of life, despair of attaining salvation, and, above all, an overall compelling absence of joy and hope.

People in the grips of fatalism stop trying to achieve good things, and instead focus on limiting bad things, which inevitably becomes a desire to find personal comfort and shut out the bad raging outside. To change the channel, settle into a comfy chair, and watch some pleasant propaganda while eating cheese instead of looking to see what we can create that will improve what exists, as nature perpetually does even in the darkest of times.

What has happened is that “peace” has become a substitute goal for having a functional civilization. That means that it is a state of mind; people will sacrifice civilization in order to have it, and that replaces the actual goal of achieving realistic+good actions that maintain, nurture, and advance their civilization.

When your society succeeds, it tries to “fix” its remaining problems, but these are either inherent problems to humanity, or minor, which means that it gives up on its big goals to pursue mostly irrelevant ones (like subsidizing the have-nots).

In addition, the society confuses mediating authority with cause-effect relationships. Where cause-effect links are clear in nature, in a civilization, the cause of everything is either the power structure or the herd opinion.

This means that people begin rationalizing as soon as society succeeds. Where before you did a task to achieve an end, now you choose a task that you know will (1) not get you criticized but also (2) make you stand out.

The transition from goal-orientation to individualism — a form of method-orientation, since “keeping everyone unified” is one of the methods of civilization success, but eventually becomes its only method — occurs through liberalization:

We removed our Kings and replaced them with the middle class whose bourgeois view that “whatever is most popular must be right” is now called demotism and has three branches, elections, consumerism, and pop culture.

Democracy and its handmaidens pluralism, or the idea that we can “agree to disagree” and not make fundamental choices about civilization, and equality, or the idea that each individualist should be considered correct in how he wants to live and think, brought liberalization or the relaxing of social mores, rules, standards, and goals so that the individual could be the most important unit in society.

At this point, it makes sense to look at this situation through psychological economics. That is, people seek mental states where they feel content and safe, and will often trade off long-term well-being for the same.

Groups of people have no “skin in the game” or direct profit-and-loss from civilization failure. Even more, being able to manipulate people, especially those better-looking or smarter than they are, makes them feel more confident and secure.

They hit on “mind your own business” as a catch-all for “no one can tell me I am being unrealistic,” which they hide behind the idea that these people “think they are better than me,” in turn a code for the hierarchy of those who are able to perceive reality, some more clearly than others.

This pluralism — the idea that all opinions must be tolerated, and never brought back to a baseline question of “what is real?” (and later, “what of what is real is good?”) — arises directly from individualism because the defensive individual wants to prohibit notice or criticism of his actions.

They sell it under an aegis of pacifism, or the idea that by eliminating hierarchy, we eliminate conflict, and therefore society is just fine as it is because it runs itself and our actions have no consequences.

When you mind your own business, creating a pluralistic environment, all viewpoints are accepted in parallel, but this creates a void of leadership, so pluralism itself becomes the new dogma.

The individualist seeks to ensure his own “freedom” from oversight by those who may know better, so he extends the same luxury to all others who are willing to support him, forming a clique, gang, mafia, and resistance that demands equality.

In doing so he makes a Devil’s Bargain: he gives up his individuality, or ability to be separate from the group, by binding the group together with a shared ideology of pluralism and equality, concealing their mutual individualism.

This creates a mass pathology of equality, where each individual hopes to gain freedom from society, but in doing so, creates the oppressive social force which insists that all people obey a dogma:

However, none of them have identified the real root, which is individualism, or a fatalism that believes nothing in the world is worth experiencing and therefore, the individual must come first before all else:

It made more sense to call out the pathology — like a panic, fad, trend, stampede, dancing sickness, or mass delusion — for what it was, namely a form of individualism turned into collectivism through socializing and peer pressure:

The belief, whether known in language to its bearer or not, that the individual should predominate over all other concerns is Crowdism. We name it according to the crowd because crowds are the fastest to defend individual autonomy; if any of its members are singled out, and doubt thrown upon their activities or intentions, the crowd is fragmented and loses its power. What makes crowds strong is an inability of any to criticize their members, or to suggest any kind of goal that unites people, because what makes for the best crowds is a lack of goal. Without a higher vision or ideal, crowds rapidly degenerate into raiding parties, although of a passive nature. They argue for greater “freedom.” They want more wealth. Anything they see they feel should be divided up among the crowd.

Crowdism strikes anyone who values individual comfort and wealth more than doing what is right. People of a higher mindset leave situations in a higher state of order than when they were found. This requires that people form an abstraction describing how organization works, and create in themselves the moral will to do right, and thus embark on a path that is not accessible to everyone: the smarter and more clearsighted one is, the greater likelihood exists that one is realizing things that an audience of average people have not yet comprehended. For this reason, Crowdists hate people who leave situations in a higher state of order than when they were found. These people threaten to rise above the crowd, and thus fragment the crowd by revealing individual deficiencies again, and that steals the only method of power the crowd has: superior numbers and the illusion that everyone in the crowd is in agreement as to what must be done.

In short, a crowd does not exist except where underconfidence unites people who, being unable to lead on their own, find solace in the leadership and power of others. They want to be in control, but they are afraid to lead, and thus each person in the crowd delegates his authority to others. The crowd therefore moves not by choices, but by lowest common denominator, assessing each decision in terms of what all people in the crowd have in common. Predictably, this makes its decisions of such a base nature they can be guessed in advance. A crowd derives its momentum from the need of its members coupled with their fear of their own judgment.

Few understand Crowdism because they insist that since it acts as a collective, its impulse must be toward a collective, like altruism or ideology. In reality, a Crowd is formed from those who lack any direction and are unhappy, aimless, and looking for something or someone to blame.

In support of this, I pointed to a few specifics that I picked up in middle school or high school as anomalous events in European history that, if slowed down and made into background context, would explain the normal conditions of low performance by high intelligence groups:

In the sixteenth century, people became afflicted with pathology of dancing until collapse:

In July 1518, residents of the city of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) were struck by a sudden and seemingly uncontrollable urge to dance. The hysteria kicked off when a woman known as Frau Troffea stepped into the street and began to silently twist, twirl and shake. She kept up her solo dance-a-thon for nearly a week, and before long, some three-dozen other Strasbourgeois had joined in. By August, the dancing epidemic had claimed as many as 400 victims.

The Strasbourg dancing plague might sound like the stuff of legend, but it’s well documented in 16th century historical records. It’s also not the only known incident of its kind. Similar manias took place in Switzerland, Germany and Holland, though few were as large — or deadly — as the one triggered in 1518.

According to historian John Waller, the explanation most likely concerns St. Vitus, a Catholic saint who pious 16th century Europeans believed had the power to curse people with a dancing plague. When combined with the horrors of disease and famine, both of which were tearing through Strasbourg in 1518, the St. Vitus superstition may have triggered a stress-induced hysteria that took hold of much of the city.

This introduces us to one aspect of human herd behavior, the mania. This type of trend combines panic and a desire to be accepted by the herd, so people emulate others even to the point of self-destruction. They become caught up in what the herd is doing and surrender their own autonomy in order to be accepted.

We might point to other manias that are slower and less obvious, like the panic over alcohol that led to Prohibition in America, or even the investment fad that caused the stock crash that led to the Great Depression. We could even be in the grips of a longer-term one spanning centuries with egalitarianism, which people find difficult to reject.

I named a few others, which I made fun of on my radio show back in the 1990s, as well to provide examples of mass trend behavior:

Now of course I know: people in dying civilizations simply go insane as a group. Like the tulip mania, dancing sickness, Okinawans walking into the sea, witch trials, Satanic Panic, and peasant revolts, a trend becomes a mass obsession as people emulate each other and reality becomes far distant.

This means that unlike the far-Right, which targets symptoms like diversity and big government, the root of our problem arises with a symbol, equality, that is itself part of and prone to induce a mass mania, at which point everyone goes insane as a group and rushes off the cliff of unrealism.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Fred Nietzsche wrote the above, having looked into the hard determinism of Schopenhauer and crossed it with the analysis of the Greeks, which inspected inner motivations instead of external material solutions.

All of these go back to my initial observation, which was that groups lose goals and become individualistic, and from this a collective mutually compelled by fear arises.

When people identify as a group, they do so at first by working toward a goal: establish the group, make it thrive, and then make life comfortable.

Once life is good, however, they find themselves fixated on “problems” with what is otherwise assumed to be good, and devote themselves to these problems, which then take over their minds.

They take for granted their civilization and forget about the necessity of maintaining it, focusing instead on problems, which creates false unity in the group oriented toward the negative because to win membership in the group, you must notice and discuss problems.

When this becomes normal behavior, people socialize based on negativity and, because these problems are ultimately inconsequential, start treating all of their opinions as trivialities or adornments to their personalities.

This insincerity creates the bourgeois mentality of people who just attend jobs, pay taxes, and offer critique but have no plans to change themselves or offer solutions.

Those who insist that the goal is civilization, and there are no Utopias therefore problems will always be present, are roundly ignored and forced to become “conservatives,” basically people waiting for the right moment during total collapse to say “I told you so!” to everyone else.

Dark organizations arise when within a social group, a sub-group exists of people with no skin in the game — i.e. have-nots or those with wealth but not enough to be important — who see a benefit in manipulating the crowd, namely that they stand out as having a winning critique because it is popular, while using that aegis of altruism to conceal their own misdeeds.

They give up their individuality, because now they are slaves to the Crowd, in favor of individualism, or “me first and no one can tell me they know better,” which elevates “me first” to the status of morally good in the public eye.

This dovetails with the tendency of a permanent civilization to become means-over-ends, or focused on method and procedure instead of goals, since it has forgotten its fundamental goal of making a thriving and good civilization.

Means-over-ends thinking signifies that the civilization and its people have no goal. They are complaining about what they have, projecting all of their discontent into scapegoats, and missing the bigger picture.

This type of thinking also leads to bureaucracy and imposed morality, since both claim to use a method (means) to make bad people or indifferent people into good people, since when they follow the right procedure in theory they end up doing good.

Religions specialize in this viewpoint, and religions and politics quickly merge into a type of morality police of several different types, with each offering its own method as the solution to all problems.

Bureaucracy becomes seen as the ideal “order,” since it forces everyone to behave the same way and be treated the same way, therefore in theory keeping the group together, much like the moralism of organized religion.

Naturally this fails because those who have bad intent simply use the cloak of goodness to conceal their bad acts, offloading the burdens they create onto the dwindling group of those who do good by their nature.

This creates a society of deception, where all seek to appear virtuous by rationalizing from the dominant idea of equality, but plan in private to exploit the system because they realize it is dysfunctional.

That in turn creates a culture of ironism, or rejection of what is obviously real and actual so that they can offer fanciful visions which seduce others, thus allowing the vision-giver to get away with his own exploits.

This arises from fatalism, or a frustration with life because it does not make sense, since there is no goal and the necessity of civilization has been forgotten in the mad rush for the pursuit of ironic non-solutions.

Fatalism leads to ironism because when there is no point trying to actually make sense and work toward a goal, appealing to novelty advances the individual, usually by making a promise that reality is not what it seems, and the “secret” new reality allows more “me first” or even subsidies from society to make “me first” affordable.

When someone is in the grips of fatalism, they believe that life cannot be good and all we have is fear, therefore it makes sense to focus on personal convenience and social interaction as a compensation and distraction from the badness of reality.

This accelerates the anti-realism conspiracy innate to dying civilizations. Ironism requires that people deny reality in order to assert some quirky, unexpected, offbeat, or oddball vision of the world so that they can draw attention to themselves, compensating for their fatalism.

It also leads, like means-over-ends, to deprecating long-term focus in favor of a tunnel vision on the short term. Compensatory actions — taking drugs, gambling, sex, distraction — are designed to make the human feel better immediately, while purposeful actions build stability so that in the long term, there is an absence of bad feelings like starvation, disorder, and dysfunction.

The Devil’s Bargain — trading individuality for individualism, or the ability to be “me first” while masking it with altruism — forces a reliance on rationalization, or the process of justifying and validating actions under the aegis of some universally recognized ideal like altruism.

Through this process, thinking becomes inverted. Instead of thinking of what we need to do, and then how to do it (ends-over-means) we start by thinking of how we can do things, and then what tasks those can be extended to (means-over-ends) but this ultimately extends further into rationalization, or finding an ideal upon which the Crowd mostly agrees to use as a cover story.

For example, if you want an excuse to open up a new polluting plant, you say that it will create jobs; if you want to steal money, you say that you are helping the poor and then set up a non-profit where you can help yourself to a fat salary.

In other words, the goal of producing positive results in the real world has been replaced by the aspiration to choose socially accepted ideals — equality, anti-poverty, diversity, empathy, altruism, compassion — and use them to rationalize and justify what you want to do independent of those considerations.

The Devil’s Bargain means that while you get to live in a world where you do not lose social status for making bad choices, you still must rationalize all of your behavior by the precedents set by past ideological events, and therefore, you are limited to what flows from those events only:

Control arises from a form of rationalization, or instead of choosing what one needs, explaining to oneself that what one has is in fact what is needed. When people are powerless, self-pitying, or dysfunctional, they rationalize.

Rationalization requires scapegoats because, since one has not chosen what one needs, the false substitute that is chosen instead does not really work, and therefore a scapegoat must be found and blamed for the failure.

No one can identify the true cause of our problem because they insist on Control, which requires setting up a symbolic goal, a theory to rationalize it as good instead of second-best to realistic adaptation, and a scapegoat to explain the continued failure.

Mass movements like democracy depend on Control in order to keep society minimally organized, and use that Control to force people into using identical methods as a means of keeping their brains oriented toward Control.

When society has a goal, it will not have Control, but will instead reward those who advance toward the goal, punish those who get in the way, and ignore everyone else.

As soon as the goal evaporates, societies become rationalization engines, driven by a desire for individualism and the pathology that incites it, fatalism. People who believe everything is doomed tend to focus on themselves only.

Fatalism propels people into a mentality of humanism, or the idea of valuing humanity only and seeing nature, logic, and the divine as hostile forces which must be subjugated like we dominated nature.

People in the grips of this mentality tend to want to standardize every aspect of life so that it can be controlled and so that it contains no threatening surprises. They like transactional and bureaucratic interactions. They fear uncontrolled social, intellectual, and physical confrontation.

At that point, your society divides into a game of humanists versus realists. The humanists want individualism that society subsidizes by absorbing externalized costs and handing out benefits, where the realists want us to pay attention to how the world works outside of the human sphere; the latter includes religion, or at least religions which do not also oppose reality.

We blame the external in order to face our inner doubt which propels the fatalism we suffer. When there is no goal, people do not know what to do in order to be well esteemed by their friends, a type of social goodwill.

As noted by some savvy observers, goodwill is treated like an irrelevant factor but it may be the most important factor in business and personal life. When people think well of you, they write off your foibles as error and work in your favor. If your company has goodwill, people will buy your products at higher prices until they have a bad experience and flee to a competitor.

Social goodwill reflects how people will work with you to achieve what you need. This includes the “connections” and “contacts” that modern people rant about as well as how willing people are to follow your leadership, believe what you assert, and overlook glitches and disadvantages while you are attempting something until they can see the final result.

In a hierarchical society, those who advance the goal receive more goodwill, including social status; those who fail or refuse to do so experience a lowering of goodwill and social status.

Egalitarian societies seek to change this process so that “good” and “bad” — respectively, advancing the goal and subverting the goal — become equal, all so that each citizen can enjoy egalitarianism protected by the group and the Control authorities it then creates.

On the other hand, dealing with reality makes most of us feel less powerful. It does not fit into our convenient mental containers and therefore, its reactions are often unpredictable to us.

In order to avoid that, we abolish the real and live in worlds of perfect abstraction and pure symbolism, such as Heaven, numbers, and social approval. When we say we want to be “free,” we really mean free from the burden of reality.

This pathology quickly spreads like a mental disorder because to get along with the insane, we must make ourselves insane similarly:

Our findings reveal that when organizations hire employees from other, unhealthy organizations (those with a high prevalence of mental disorders), they “implant” depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders into their workforces. Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis of a mental disorder. The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.

Narcissism, by the way, was known to the ancients as hubris or the mental disorder of thinking that humans are gods or godlike in their powers:

1884, a back-formation from hubristic or else from Greek hybris “wanton violence, insolence, outrage,” originally “presumption toward the gods;” the first element probably PIE *ud- “up, out” (see out (adv.)) but the meaning of the second is debated.

The theme of people out of sync with the natural order — rising in their own narcissism, unable to figure out where their niche is, and like tyrants trying to seize power that they cannot wield, falling into the trap where the power will become self-serving because it is unstable because they cannot wield it — runs through Greek thought.

This reflects a society that has reached success and now suffers mostly from problems of human delusion, most of which arise from narcissism or its weaponized form, sociopathy, since it no longer faces challenges from the natural world or the need to organize.

When civilization is achieved, humanity preys on itself through narcissistic delusion, as the Greeks warned us through the parable of Icarus:

The myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus also lays its strong hand on our elemental craving to fly. Daedalus was a mythical Greek architect and sculptor. When he offended Minos, the King of Crete, Minos threw him and Icarus into prison. Daedalus made wings of wax and feathers. He and Icarus used the wings to fly to Sicily and to freedom. In some versions, Icarus flies too high — too close to the sun. The wax melts and he falls to his death.

In other words, once we have a method of dealing with nature, we start viewing it as a way to rise above the laws of nature, and consequently, lead ourselves into doom by converting the means of our power into the means of our defeat.

This pattern repeats time and again. Useful drugs become addictive; more efficient food becomes junk food and a diabetes obesity epidemic; useful political systems become self-serving, the definition of tyranny.

Much as we switch from ends-over-means to means-over-ends thinking, when the tool becomes the replacement goal and the original goal is forgotten, we turn into inverted people rationalizing from the tool so that we can ignore reality, which makes us dependent on signaling:

In other words, the tool becomes the master; the representation and the tokens used to describe it become the reality recognized by others, and reality itself is forgotten. Social pressures reinforce this reality and force conformity to it, so soon actual realism becomes demonized!

The West went down this path because we succeeded and produced a large number of people as waste product. These people could not succeed without civilization, and this enraged them, so they set about destroying it through a process of narcissistic revenge which led us to oligarchy and eventually democracy.

By making the tool into the master and the means into the ends, we have committed the classical logical fallacy of a b-to-a error:

Language can fool us. We know that in logic A->B does not necessarily mean B->A. The most common error in human thinking — seen in reversed cognition, neurosis, superstition, pareidolia and cherry-picking — is to assume B->A.

When our thinking becomes inverted, society becomes inverted. This is why, like with the adoption of any technology, the technology for permanent civilization works until a certain point and then works against itself.

The only way to stay in the “sweet spot” of a good civilization is to have one that constantly renews itself by rewarding those who achieve the goal, and demoting those who fail.

A mob arises because people fear this process. They would rather have a decaying civilization than face the possibility of being seen for the non-contributors or counter-contributors that they are.

This starts with a small group, but spreads to any who have low confidence, a condition created by society having too many rules for people to succeed at the simple task of making stuff work well.

This leads to a dirty snowball effect where all of the people who are afraid band together to destroy their own civilization out of personal fear, then only later realize that they have created tyranny, as we see in the contemporary West:

In the postwar years, Leftism has taken over the West not so much for its goodness, but for its mediocrity. When you have a great history and legacy of learning to build upon, mediocrity seems like a good idea, because you essentially neuter society so that individuals can go ahead and do the great things in technology, science, mathematics, physics, industry, and agriculture that make a civilization powerful and wealthy. This is resistance to the decay part of the cycle struggling against inertia.

However, at some point, the mediocrity wave catches up. The cost of paying off the parasites goes up each year because whatever you tolerate, focus on, or subsidize increases; the competence of institutions decreases as bad decisions hamstring them with paradoxical instructions and fill them with increasingly incompetent bean-counters. Mediocrity only goes in one direction, further down. Once the cycle is fully dominant, only mediocrity will be rewarded.

Currently, our society finds itself divided not by social media — the current scapegoat — but by the almost-universal dominance of the Left, which has caused the Left to become more extreme because it has nowhere else to expand

Mobs are only as smart as the stupidest person in the mob, since in order to hold the mob together, it must include everyone, which since people are widely varied, requires focus on the lowest common denominator.

Most importantly, this means a short term focus, since few people can think beyond the next pay period — approximately two weeks — in how they anticipate the world and its responses to their actions.

Things that take months, years, decades, centuries, or millennia to manifest? These are as absent from their cognition as the current weather report for Alpha Centauri.

Mob rule creates a need for control, or the regulation of methods used in order to influence thinking with the goal of keeping the Crowd together as a source of power.

Control features heavily in Asiatic tyrannies like those of Darius and Genghis Khan, and relies on social conditioning to influence behavior and enforce standardization, centralization, uniformity, and conformity

This type of thinking reflects a mature society where the raw dangers of nature have been conquered. It has enough food, shelter, water, and defense against predators that people want for little, which allows them to indulge in the oldest human error, solipsism (synonyms: individualism, hubris, narcissism, egotism). At that point they drift away from understanding a hierarchy, pattern, process, and rhythm to nature, and start relying on tools to shape life.

This reveals the beginnings of control, or the attempt to use external force to arrange ourselves internally. This can be as simple as locking up your liquor so that you will not drink it, while knowing that you have the key (and therefore, will eventually give in). Control means manipulation of our minds by external means.

It arose from our dual tendencies to use tools and socialize. When we rely on tools, we start seeing the tool as the task, instead of the method to the task; method replaces goal this way. Language falls under tools, since it also enables efficiency. Socialization refers to our ability to make others like us by being good guys, but eventually it too becomes a method in itself, taking over from the goal of collaboration and replacing it with deference to bullies and the herd. Morality is a variety of socialization.

This should surprise no one: create a society of equals, and end up with a fungible mass of humanity where the individual is insignificant and basically a duplicate of all others.

Any idea, object, or practice subjected to this group will be adapted to the needs of the group. Call it “The Metallica Effect”: whatever responds to its audience will quickly resemble that audience, in a process of norming that also simplifies and denatures it by removing anything actually controversial.

Political correctness works the same way as fast food. Remove anything which someone might object to, then cover it with sugar and salt, and make it popular with a media blitz so soon it displaces any real competition.

This follows a general strategy of acting against reality and against those who are competent in that reality, figuring that by neutering and domesticating each other, we can avoid conflict and therefore, not have to fear those who know better and might point out our weakness:

For this reason, humans in groups always seek to remove those in authority and to ban any means by which someone could rise above the rest, effectively using civilization as a pre-emptive strike against anyone more competent than they are. Hobble the strong, intelligent, healthy, wise, good, and sane, and you are free to be as weak, stupid, sloppy, vapid, morally convenient, and mentally unstable as you want.

Managing society by procedure is a way of regulating method, sometimes called “means,” in order to in turn control goals, sometimes called “ends.” If you hobble everyone, remove the claws of the lions, and leave them only with rote procedure, they are all good little dummies for you to command.

That is the essence of the “Mandarin Method,” and it appeals to 99.9% of humanity who will apply it like insane malfunctioning robots, meaning that even as it fails they will double down and ram it harder upon the rest of us. They want to be the tyrant-CEO managing millions of obedient, conformist, scared and weak little dummies. Mandarins love morons.

Most people are not morons per se but soft-hearted useful idiots who just want to get along with others socially so that they as individuals can get ahead, and they will sacrifice anything else — especially accurate depictions of reality, history, culture, religion, and science — in order to do this.

For your average person, the world can only be understood through its social dimension: What do others say about it? Is it popular, therefore likely to be “good” and a “good value”? What are your friends doing and using to solve certain issues in their lives?

They take society at face value — believing that what is told to them accurately reflects the intent behind it, so when a politician says he wants to end poverty, that really is his goal, and not simply expanding the bureaucracy so he can hire his family and friends on the government dime — because to them everything is a social concern.

In conversation, you take your friends at face value; to do otherwise would be impolite. When they say that they support equality in order to end the suffering of midgets, transsexuals, the poor, minorities, and women, you are obligated to believe them in order to be sociable.

This reflects the bourgeois view, which is that society has no cause or effect relationship; it merely is, and requires no work from you or anyone else to maintain it. You avoid the deeper issues and focus on making friends, advancing your career, and becoming socially notable in your circle.

Although the Left has preached otherwise, the secret behind the bourgeois is that it does not belong to the upper classes, but to all people who take society at face value as a transaction of tax money for membership. Bourgeois thinkers do not believe that life exists outside of civilization and the city, and they embrace cosmopolitan, pluralistic, and liberal values as a means of getting along with each other.

This helps us tumble down the precedent spiral staircase. We agree with our friends that they should be able to do what they want, which requires equality, and then rationalizing from that, we follow precedent. Equality begets civil rights, socialism, feminism, and other means of advancing the goal of total equality.

As the precedent storm intensifies, we get further from the original idea and more into its descendants which are then accepted as gospel and used further to rationalize. First you get legal equality, then people want social equality a.k.a. no social hierarchy, so they enforce against anyone who does not treat everyone exactly the same way. Then some notice that their position in life started out bad, so they want a compensatory boost in the rankings. After that, people figure out that lots of people are not making it to the equal level, which means that the society must either admit (a) equality is nonsense or (b) double down on more equality, so you get socialism. And on down the line until you reach something like full Communism with free beer.

While this is happening, the state serves as the tool of implementation, but not the impetus. The Crowd itself enforces the cascade of precedent which moves the political dialogue perpetually toward more liberalization, more equality, and more humanism contra realism:

Like a clique, gang, cult, trend, mob, herd, sect, or riot, this group operates by demanding obedience to the group above all else and being hostile to anything else. You either join or fight, in other words, so like a snowball the group picks up new members and soon beats the others in power, but then has to face the ugly fact that it has no realistic plan and therefore will fail.

The important factor here is the recognition that human downfall does not occur through ideology; ideology arises because of downfall, and the cause of downfall is human psychology, so we need to “design around” this psychology if we want to avoid future civilization collapse.

Crowdism tells us that The Human Pattern (of dark organization, cult, and failure) appears in any organization, group, community, or society, and does not require an external force (Satan, Jews, Communism) but is innate to humanity.

Your average person in this society adopts a poise explained best by game theory. They recognize that the symbolic world of equality, based in a mathematical symbol never proven to exist in nature or apply to humans, is fake; they nonetheless must live in it and succeed in it by advancing socially, which requires enthusiastically endorsing it.

Like a body conjuring a fever, they also employ the technique of encouraging others to pursue the illusion while using it to cover their own bad deeds, so that they can take more from the system before others get a chance.

People like equality because it gives them a nearly ironclad defense against others while incapacitating those others as well. This means that they must promote a lie while hiding behind it and using it to clobber others.

Another way to view it is that they create a competing reality, like a vision of heaven or a world of pure symbol, in which all are socially compelled to live, but outside of which, those who recognize it is a lie can exploit it while all the others are rushing toward the false goal.

This creates personal bubble worlds where people exist in a space comprised entirely of symbolic values, and by the nature of the ideology of equality, filter out anything which rejects those bubble worlds.

That method allows the removal of reality and its replacement with the human social sphere in which they can play their game, turning society into a manipulative Control gambit where only the cynical and self-serving triumph:

A conservative really begins life when realism dawns. This makes him a post-social entity, capable of analyzing life and using judgment — the ability to estimate degree, duration, quality, resilience, and side effects — to make choices about which things are better than others in certain contexts. As others have pointed out, life consists of few absolutes, but almost always trade-offs; you have multiple imperfect options and have to choose the best fit, given limitations like time, focus, energy, money, and the will of those around you (here is where realism overlaps somewhat with pragmatism). This means that the conservative exists beyond symbolism, or the search for ideals, and instead keeps ideals in the category of perpetual but never fully obtainable goals. He acts for what reality offers, and tries to carry through as many of his principles as possible, but balances everything against the ultimate test: quality of outcome in reality.

If a person decides to step out of the symbolic- and socially-mediated world in which most people live, he or she can no longer be part of Leftism, which consists of one idea only, egalitarianism. That idea refers to a symbolic reality in which the need of the individual to act without regard to consequences outweighs the need for social, natural, or moral order. Egalitarians believe in “equality” so that they, as individuals, are beyond criticism; it validates human herding behavior, where each person attempts to get close to the center of the action while fleeing the periphery where they are close to predators and irrelevance. Leftism requires a symbolic belief system, or ideology, while conservatism rejects the idea entirely.

When people are realistic, no belief system is required. They do what works, and then pick the qualitatively best option — that which enhances the pleasure and degree of experience in life — out of the list of what works.

As soon as society deviates from reality and goes into the humanist social sphere, an ideology is required to explain (as ironists always do) that reality is not as it appears, and that the artificial symbolic reality is in fact more real because it is widely socially accepted, therefore reality must be rejected and the symbolic reality followed.

These false realities invariably begin with the Big Lie, or the notion that people are “equal” or roughly comparable in intellectual, moral, and perceptual ability, when in fact all data shows the exact opposite, which is that not only do abilities vary, but people are highly individualized, having their own preferences of method and aesthetics.

Societies adopt the Big Lie when they become successful enough to no longer have to struggle with natural reality every day.

In adopting the Big Lie, they create the symbolic world that ultimately destroys them by making them hostile to the patterns and structures of reality which govern our actions internally, i.e. are not imposed upon it from without, but form patterns within it that determine success or failure.

Think of a chair. Socially speaking, a civilization can decide to make chairs with two legs and even find a way to make them mostly work. However, a functional chair has four, or three if internal supports are used, and so chairs falling over in a two-legged society becomes the norm. Reality is what it is because the logic of life relates to how life operates, not how humans intend it to.

Periodically these societies, following precedent, decide that since the previous level of the Big Lie is not working because it contradicts reality, they must adopt the next level in the rationalization chain rather than admit the failing of the Big Lie, which at that point is the basis of their legal, political, and economic systems.

At some point, this drives them to civilizational collapse since they are pursuing the unreal at the expense of the real:

They call it the Great Reset because they want to end our previous system and replace it with one that has markets directed toward ideological ends, socialist wealth redistribution through entitlements, and diversity to ensure lots of people keep voting for more stuff taken from the wealthy few.

Every society collapses this way. By organizing, it thrives, but also produces lots of people who are nothing more than labor. They do not understand how anything works, so figure that if they demand free money, nothing will change except that they get more money, whether higher minimum wage, welfare, or socialized medicine. In the process, they kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, which is the productive segment of higher-IQ people who make the most sane and logical choices in leadership, and therefore produce stability and consistency, causing the production of wealth because we are doing the same things that we always do, only more efficiently. Doing this requires eliminating corruption, or people taking for themselves what would give back tenfold to the system.

Each third world society on Earth functions the same way: government gives out free stuff, but there is too little to have any effect, and the citizens constantly vote hard for more free stuff, at which point most of it is stolen and there is too little to have any effect. The rich get rich by hiding income, using it well, and then buying off politicians so they can keep some of what they have. You end up with a giant herd of genetically-broken masses consuming everything they touch like a plague of locusts, and nasty selfish rich people who hoard wealth and kill off their opposition. This is how human societies self-destruct, and it takes many centuries, but eventually you get back to people living in huts, farming small properties, foraging, and lying, cheating, stealing, raping, and killing each other with impunity. That is the stage after a “great reset.”

As the COVID-19 panic winds down, we can see that yet again we have been victims of the Crowd. A large group, panicked at the pandemic they expected, was easily manipulated by a few who knew which symbols to use.

Every level of our society demonstrated two things: incompetence, and a lust for power. Not just elected leaders and unelected bureaucrats but everyday people reveled in being able to tell others what to do.

As it turns out, following the Crowd is a Devil’s Bargain: you gain the ability to conceal your pursuit of me-first individualism and fool others, but you must obey the dictates of the Crowd.

When it signals that something goes against the Prime Rationalization Precedent a.k.a. the Big Lie, you must obey. If not, someone else will force it on you, and like the clever monkey they are get popularity points for having “protected The People.”

We have seen how democracy ends and it is in a cloud of Mask Karens, psychologically abusive teachers, creepily controlling journalists, and experts of all types who just bleat-repeated what those around them said because whatever is popular is right, and that seemed the way to advance their careers, which meant that consequences to others were unimportant.

We have wrecked our society, but we have no one to blame but ourselves. We agreed on individualism, egalitarianism, and democracy; we decided that we would have leaders who enforced equality instead of stood up for what was right (we voted those out long ago).

Consequently, nothing remains but chaos, as always happens when a society ends. It rationalizes itself into oblivion, then erases its history, and finally imports foreigners to keep those who are ruling in power perpetually.

If not directed otherwise, humans — who are self-destructive in their pursuit of power over mortal smallness, or the inconsequential and powerless nature of our lives — will form Crowds, abolish reality, and pursue illusion to their doom.

This is what you will read here that you will not find anywhere else on the Left or Right, although some religious scriptures and philosophers hint at it. Humanity is a self-deceiving conspiracy, and we are seeing it self-destruct once again.

Tags: big lie, crowdism, mob rule, rationalization